This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Prince Harry’s war

Britain’s Prince Harry justifies his actions in Afghanistan on the grounds that you need to ‘take a life to save a life.’

Prince Harry speaks to a television crew during a December interview that was broadcast last week. (WPA Pool / GETTY IMAGES)

By John Sainsbury

Sat., Jan. 26, 2013

Britain’s nearly forgotten war in Afghanistan was reinscribed in the public consciousness last week with the release of a television interview with Prince Harry (“Captain Wales,” as he’s known to his comrades) taped shortly before his departure from Camp Bastion in the country’s troubled Helmand Province.

A few days later, Prime Minister David Cameron was announcing that his government intended to hold a referendum on whether Britain should remain in the European Union.

The proximity of these events has some observers suggesting that highlighting Britain’s neo-imperial adventure in Central Asia, through the person of a royal prince, is an artful government ploy intended to compensate for the country’s diminishing role in Europe.

That implies a degree of Machiavellian calculation beyond the capacity of the present government. Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian, makes a less extreme but more convincing case that the Prince Harry interview was designed to refurbish the image of Britain’s Ministry of Defence, not that of the Royal Family.

Jenkins points to the long tradition of “swashbuckling royals” from the Black Prince, Prince Rupert, and George II (the last English monarch to lead an army into battle) to the “sailor kings” of more modern times, William IV and George V.

Article Continued Below

Historically, “the monarchy . . . needed a bit of glamour from war,” Jenkins suggests. Now the tables have turned and war needs a bit of glamour from the monarchy.

While it’s questionable whether the House of Windsor is an institution capable of endowing glamour, “the firm” has certainly been performing much better of late. There is still an afterglow from the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and the pregnancy of Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, lends hope for the future.

The Royal Family has recovered its bearings after the turbulence of Princess Diana’s reign of whimsy. Its members stick dutifully to their assigned roles in the regal pageant. As bearer of the royal fetus, Kate currently has pride of place. But Harry — who will move down a notch in the line of succession with the birth of his niece or nephew — has been filling the role of warrior prince with gusto.

It’s one thing, however, to be a warrior prince, quite another to be unwittingly cast as the acceptable face of a grim, apparently endless war. Warrior princes are not known for their discretion and pliability and Harry is no exception. For starters, he makes no secret of his disdain for the “rubbish” press, under whose expansive rubric he includes the so-called quality newspapers and the BBC.

Yet, ironically, Harry’s tendency to go off script and say outlandish things make him the press’s delight. His comment that his brother was “jealous” of his front-line service, and wished that he could join him in it, must have left his family cringing with embarrassment. I can imagine the stricken expression on the faces of Will and Kate as they watched the interview from their haven of marital delight.

Under the circumstances, Harry handled with aplomb the inevitable question about his highly publicized sexual capers in Las Vegas. Too much army, not enough prince, he conceded.

The most controversial part of the interview was Harry’s casual, emotionally detached, admission that as the gunner on the heavily armed Apache helicopter he likely killed an unspecified number of Taliban insurgents. He makes pressing the kill button sound like an extension of the video games in which he claims to excel.

He justifies his actions on the grounds that you need to “take a life to save a life,” a precept that matches the creed inscribed on his helmet: “Go ugly early.”

What redeems Harry in the eyes of many, including the spin masters in the Ministry of Defence, is that he’s driven by a genuine and fierce loyalty to his fellow soldiers, especially the troops on the ground, whom the helicopter crews are pledged to protect. He evokes an appealing world of close comradeship and mutual respect, and one — as army recruiters will duly note — that is essentially (if not formally) egalitarian.

His words sometimes come across like a laconic version of those uttered by another militant “Harry,” Shakespeare’s Henry V, before the Battle of Agincourt: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers / For he today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition.”

While vocal on the ethos of the warrior, Harry is silent on the purposes of the war. But how could he be otherwise? The war itself has lost any meaningful strategic objective. But it does retain a crude moral dimension in which good Prince Harry and the rest of the lads confront evil in the person of the Taliban. And in this comic-book universe, Harry certainly makes a compelling action hero.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com